# AWS EC2 Spot Instances

8 Hacker News commenters recommended AWS EC2 Spot Instances and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended as cheap spare EC2 capacity, with instances often lasting hours between interruptions.

## Why people recommend it

- Cheaper than regular EC2 capacity (2 comments): "It feels like EC2 is the better deal, but maybe more of a pain to deal with their UI." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640349)) "EC2 Spot Instances are a great example about how to turn that waste into revenue." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48579920))
- Used as cheap CI runners (2 comments): "moved to gitea + ec2 spot for actions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49331938)) "Queue to aws spot instances" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47381794))

## What people warn about

- Higher interruption risk on GPUs (1 comments): "Contention is higher for GPU, but I only saw disruptions maybe once every 2 months for super common instance types." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46899353))
- Console harder to use (1 comments): "It feels like EC2 is the better deal, but maybe more of a pain to deal with their UI." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640349))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Hetzner](https://hackerapproved.com/p/hetzner.md): 415 recommend
- [DigitalOcean](https://hackerapproved.com/p/digitalocean.md): 133 recommend
- [exe.dev](https://hackerapproved.com/p/exe-dev.md): 115 recommend
- [Hetzner Cloud](https://hackerapproved.com/p/hetzner-cloud.md): 99 recommend
- [OVH hosting](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ovh.md): 81 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "AWS EC2 Spot Instances", https://hackerapproved.com/p/aws-ec2-spot-instances/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).